INTEGRA Biosciences’ pipettes help to progress infectious disease testing

Cormeum Lab Services, a cutting-edge clinical testing laboratory in Louisiana, is using a range of pipetting solutions from INTEGRA Biosciences to streamline its infectious disease testing workflows. The laboratory acquired additional liquid handling instruments to cope with ever growing demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, and these tools are now supporting expansion of its testing capabilities.

Cormeum Lab Services was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic in response to growing demands for reliable diagnostics. The facility chose VIAFLO electronic pipettes to allow for ergonomic and productive pipetting, VOYAGER adjustable tip spacing pipettes to enable parallel transfer of multiple samples between labware of different formats, and an ASSIST PLUS pipetting robot to automate its workflows and process more samples, while reducing turnaround times from 10 hours to just 5 hours per test. Leilani Graffagnini, Quality Manager in Laboratory Operations at Cormeum Lab Services, explained: “We introduced electronic and automated liquid handling solutions from INTEGRA to allow us to handle a greater volume of COVID-19 samples each day. The pipettes have significantly enhanced our workflows; instead of pipetting samples one by one, we can now transfer them row by row, and can even perform many of our protocols hands-free thanks to the ASSIST PLUS. This has improved our efficiency while minimising the risk of human error, freeing up our lab staff to work on other tasks and their ongoing professional development.”

“We can now offer industry-leading throughput, and we are confident in the quality and reliability of our results, because INTEGRA regularly calibrates the pipettes to give us complete peace of mind that everything is working as it should. In addition, the new pipettes have really helped us to stay at the forefront of diagnostics, as our enhanced capacity has enabled us to expand our range of diagnostic services to include urine, wound, nail, women’s health and STI testing, as well as antibiotic resistance testing. The innovative solutions from INTEGRA have allowed us to match our clients’ needs and keep up with a constantly changing healthcare environment,” Leilani concluded.